Douglas Dillon Book Award

Jack Cheevers provides a careful, balanced, and thoroughly researched account of the events that led to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and America’s subsequent war in Vietnam. Cheevers brings his sprawling cast of American and Vietnamese characters to life, balancing military events and strategy with the diplomatic lens from President Kennedy to junior Foreign Service officers in the field. Drawing on exceptionally well-sourced research, he shows why this regime change was especially convoluted: the number of players on each side, planning shortcomings, implementation delays, uncertainty about the desired outcome, and the confusion that followed. Cheevers’s masterful storytelling takes a well-known chronicle, provides new details, and ensures that sixty years later, his history of America’s entanglement in Vietnam remains as searing and tragic as ever.